The Glorious

A few changes to note – I have put links into the header images. The only one that actually takes you somewhere is the files tab. I’ve set up a semi-primitive photo gallery with which you can browse my collection with great ease. The template is probably about as developed as it will get (it matches the color scheme, displays fine, and reads fine, good enough).

The wedding trip was good. It caused a lot of trouble as far as school goes, which I’m only just now recovering from. All of my teachers have been unhappy with my attendance record thus far. And I’ve failed more than one test. But, I’m getting back on track, so I expect things to go back up.

We left Friday morning, had an uneventful 9 hour drive, got to the town “Chelsea, Michigan” at about 9:00 PM, had some nasty pizza, greeted our host (don’t know their names, they were a little odd), and sprinted off to the theatre to catch the 10:15 showing of Serenity. My friends, if you have not seen this movie, do yourself a favor, and see it. It was extremely good.

If you are unaware as to the nature of Serenity, it’s a movie based off the series Firefly. Firefly was one of Fox’s ‘create and cancel’ swarm, lasting only 10 episodes because every episode occured on a different day at a different time each week. It’s a sci-fi thing, but it’s not an in-your-face type in which each character’s personality is defined by the hyperbalinrakonater in their respective weapons. If you know what I mean. It’s good stuff, go watch it.

Saturday afternoon we ran off and visited Josh, John (I forgot to take pictures of them, sorry), and my Uncle for a few hours before the wedding. I had some good talks with all of them, and as always, that good old Froehlich thing makes it all a lot cooler. The wedding itself (that is, the wedding of my Uncle, and I guess my “Aunt Pat”, as of now) was short and sweet, lasted about 15 minutes, occuring in a tiny Methodist church in town.

The coolest photos come from the ride back. It was at night, and I was bored, so I took photos with a 2-second exposure time. The bumps in the road and a little manual jittering gets some cool effects. Here are a few of my favorites.

The rest can be seen here.

And now for story time. He’s got me some pictures and told a handful of stories and stuff from his experience in Iraq, but I’ll start from when he got home.

Mom and Dad got to see him arrive while I stayed back for school. Upon getting home a few days later, he handed me this, a product of his layover in Ireland. Much happiness ensued, overall, and Mom made lots of really good food.

Anyways, we were sort of in touch while he was in Iraq – we talked on the phone two or three times, and exchanged two or three letters. He didn’t have much access to a phone, limited access to a computer, so letters were the main form of communication. Basically, his day was something like this (get ready for a bulleted list here, guys):

  • Wake up in the afternoon.
  • Clean up, eat.
  • Work from evening to morning (12 hours).
  • Eat, do something recreational for an hour or two (basically either play guitar or play cards, or maybe work out), go to a meeting, clean up.
  • Sleep.

He always ran 12-hour shifts, but they’d change the time of them every 2 weeks, so he could never adjust to them fully. He would work 6 days a week (days off on Sunday), but couldn’t go anywhere on his day off. The only time he left the camp was for an escort every few months, basically meaning he’d sit in a Humvee for the majority of a day. And the camp is not an exciting place to be. Just look.

Not exciting. It’s a very bleak place, completely surrounded by walls. Of course, if you put 3 different groups of people that all hate eachother almost as much as they hate America, then you have a little more excitement. The detainees in the camp are all mostly worthy of being there (estimated at a little over 90% were true threats to the American presence in Iraq, note I say in Iraq), and more than that portion hated the soldiers. But, interestingly enough, there were three factions (names escape me) that hated eachother and would be at eachother’s throats any time they weren’t fighting to break out or kill the soldiers.

Riots would generally break out about every week or so. These consisted of one compound (basically a fenced in area where the detainees stayed) screaming, chanting, and generally making noise, and then proceeding to burn anything and everything they can. “Wait!”, you ask, “How can they burn things?”. Thanks to the morons at Abu Ghraib, “the safety of the soldiers is being sacrificed to the media gods”, as he put it. This means an inspector comes in every week to make sure that the detainees have everything they need – this includes a mosque, a Qur’an, prayer mats, portojohns, beds and tents, clothing, hand sanitizer, cigarettes, and a lighter.

Every one of those items were actively used by the detainees to kill the soldiers or eachother. The American (stress the American here) soldiers are not allowed to enter the mosque, the Qur’ans, or the prayer mats. This means whenever they do shakedowns they are not allowed to search there. A translator would go with them to make sure they did not touch a thing. Dozens of times, they would find knives (they’re fond of the knives) pouring out of this stuff, but they couldn’t do a thing about it.

Here’s an example riot. This is how they begin, with a big gathering. It looks less intense because you don’t see them jumping up and down and screaming in Arabic. The picture in the center is some religious leader (trr’rst), not of importance.

Here’s where the other weapons come in. Most of these guys are issued jumpsuits. These jumpsuits come with nice, large, elastic bands. Combine that and fist-sized rocks taken from the ground and the cinder blocks that make the foundation for their tents and beds, and you have unbelievably destructive weapons. These things go through 4″ bullet-proof glass like paper.

To disperse the crowd to make them easier to manage, they use helicoptors. It’s pretty smart – they bring them in about 30m above the ground, at which the force from the blades will easily knock a guy over, as well as any unstable structures. Like portojohns.

Here’s where the lighters, tents, and hand sanitizer come in. Meet the Purell bomb.

These are makeshift molotov cocktails, made of their headdresses, hand sanitizer, and thrown at anything. Highly explosive, and pretty darn destructive.

The hand sanitizer is mandatory, too. As for the tents, they’re just massively flammable. The canvas is usually coated in kerosene or some other sealant to improve durability, resist insects, and weatherproof it all, but obviously makes the entire thing a disaster waiting to happen. After burning the tent down, they make some more permanent holdings. Meet the ramparts of the desert.

All these do is protect them from the barrage of rubber bullets. That’s right. Through all this, the soldiers get rubber bullets, and some CS gas. Neither of these come close to stopping any determined detainee. What happens if they climb the two barbed wire fences? Oh, no problem, they just request ammo from the ammo dump outside the camp. The Americans aren’t allowed to bring live ammo into the camp unless it’s a hostile situation. Again, I stress the American part, not because it’s not an American camp, but because whenever the British or Australian troops stop by, they have live rounds. In fact, they’re not allowed to enter inside the compounds because of incidents with them killing inmates.

After all is said and done, the compound is pretty much wasted.

But of course, it’s all back up in the same day, just like it was before. Pretty efficient, I say.

And that’s a prison camp for you. There’s not a whole lot else to tell, really, except for a few amusing stories.

Portojohn graffiti is a standard in the armed services, and one such example was a soldier’s infamous mother. What was she infamous for? Nobody knows. But apparantly “V’s Mom” is etched in every portojohn in the entirity of Iraq. There is no exaggeration here.

Some of the world’s worst enter the military out of sheer inability to do anything else. One such soldier found his way into an Airborne unit at the camp. This man’s lack of personal hygene was astounding – his seargants had to escort him to the shower every morning to make sure he showered, and had to routinely check to make sure he had washed his clothes. This guy always failed his PT tests, was generally just a completely unreliable guy. Now, on his uniform, he had a patch on his arm that said “Airborne” below his rank, signifying his status. After having enough of this guy’s crap, a few guys snuck into his bunk, took his unforms, removed the “Airborne” patch and replaced it with an almost identical patch, stating “Shitbag”. This guy never noticed his new found status, and the highly ranked officers in the camp were too baffled by his incompetence to correct him. And thus it stayed on.

Many of the worst detainees in the camp are those who are friendly, speak English well, and fluent in their actions. These are usually the ones who reported directly to known trr’rst leaders. One such trr’rst was known for being a complete jerk, starting fights constantly, always out to make as much trouble for the soldiers as possible. He was constantly in and out of the isolation block, as well as the median between the two, a small fenced area seperated from the rest of the compound. This guy doles out a lot of grief on the soldiers, so he was generally hated more than the others. One soldier found him particularly bad, and felt the need to express this. He expressed this by entering his isolation area, dropping his pants, and spraying the inmate with urine in the manner of a helicopter.

The camp is a pretty big place, and empty compounds are steadily getting filled up by more inmates, so more units come in to handle them. The first night after a compound had been occupied, a controlled fire was seen within the camp, it was large, but not spreading, and no chaos was evident. The next morning, it was revealed that the new unit had gone through every tent and burned all the Qur’ans, prayer mats, weapons, hand sanitizer, lighters, and cigarettes that the inmates had, in one big pile.

Anyways, that’s about all I have for you guys. I hope you enjoyed it.

The National Rice Crispie Convention (…)

By request, this post has been outfitted with colorful bold TITLESfor each section!.

Tuesday – Frisbee

An eventful two days, to be sure. Tuesday began with disorganized ultimate in Stewart Park. It was kind of hot out 70+ with humidity, so we spent most of the time sitting around on the swings and demonstrating our physical prowess to eachother. We strolled over to Purity and got some ice cream, and that was the day. Among those present were Gwen, NOT PAUL, Ben, NOT PAUL, Veda, NOT PAUL, Julia, NOT PAUL, Zach, NOT PAUL, Ryan, NOT PAUL, and Amy.

Paul was not there because he was a lazy, lazy bum.

Tuesday – Jared’s LAN

[complaining]

Julia (or rather, her dad) gave me a ride home, and as soon as I sat down at my computer, I get a message from Jared, asking if I could come to his LAN. “Hmmm,” I think to myself. This could be fun, but it’s short notice. I thought about it as I ate dinner (consisting of grilled lemon chicken w/bbq sauce, 1/2 baked potato w/sour cream and butter, and applesauce w/marshmallows). I figure, “Why not?” and after some troubles, make my way over there, by about 9:00. It started out ok – there was a healthily-sized group there, consisting of Ben, Zach, Justin B., Jared, John (the Montana one, don’t know his last name), Charlie (don’t actually know this guy), and Ben Lu. After an hour or so, things got boring. Ben Lu, John, and Jared just kind of played their Counterstrike mods all night, and I mean all night. That’s all they did. Charlie just played San Andreas all night. That’s all he did. We were going to play some Halo 2, but Charlie was not interested in doing anything, and Jared wouldn’t really do anything either. About this point, Zach’s parents arrive with the Xbox we thought we were going to use, but ended up not touching the entire night. It’s a 15/20 minute drive out here, so that’s not a small deal. Coincidentally, Ben gets a killer headache about then, and Jared won’t/can’t do anything for him (who doesn’t have aspirin in their house? no, really?). By this time it’s about midnight-ish, and they turn on this really bad and really loud rap. Nobody in the room likes rap. Nobody. Why was it on? I don’t know. But it was. Combine four computers, a one ps2, one xbox, loud rap, and you get one ridiculously loud and painfully annoying room. After 15 minutes of asking, and then telling them to turn it down, the rap goes away, but the boredom doesn’t. Ben and Zach are fed up and walk upstairs to go sleep on the livingroom floor with, just about nothing. I wander around hoping something will become available to do, but again, the only person even talking to me is Justin, and there’s nothing for us to do, so he sticks to playing Ominusha. After an hour, I give up, and join Ben and Zach in their discomfort. Ben went down once to look for more pillows and blankets (we only had two blankets and four pillows), and discovered four of them (the one not present being Justin) huddled around his computer searching for porn. Obviously mad, Ben takes his computer back upstairs with him, and we eventually get to sleep.

I wake up to Ben L, Jared, Charlie, and John jumping around my head. Why? Because they think it’s absolutely hilarious to do that at 6:00 in the morning. Ben made mention of them possibly being drunk (this is not a remote possibility, and I am not being sarcastic), but I was unable to confirm that. Having had 4 hours of sleep, this was not pleasant. What was even less pleasant? The only food suitable (opposite nasty cold pizza and mountain dew) in the house were bagels. Bagels are fine, but they do not sustain the body. They do not cleanse the pallet of a hard livingroom floor and an upset stomache. After sitting around for an hour and a half laughing at Ominusha as Justin played it, Zach’s mom picked us up and I was home by about 8:00 or 8:30.

[/complaining]

Wednesday – Power Outage

After getting a shower, I went back to sleep for a good 4 or 5 hours, and woke up about 2:00. I hopped onto the computer, and….bzzt. The power goes out. The transformer on the telephone pole down the street exploded (not in a fantastic display of pyrotechnics, but enough to set the telephone pole on fire, and make lots of smoke. The fire department showed up and blocked off the nearby streets, which was kind of amusing to watch cars drive up and wander off in another direction in a bewildered manner. The power did not come back on immediately, so boredom seeped in very fast. Luckily my dad got home an hour or so after the power went out, so we went off to his office so I could check up on his computers (he was having problems with firefox, and I wanted to do maintenence on his old computer that I will soon inherit). By about 5:30, we head out to Chinese Buffet to get some dinner. There was some kid at the table behind us who probably broke the world record for time spoken without ever stopping. He went on and on, about how his friends are crazy about Halo 2, how the Dreamcast was so great (that was hideous to my ears, his facts were so wrong..), his friends, man, I know way more about that child than I ever want to know.

Jonothan’s Exploits

We got home, and the power still wasn’t on. Jonothan called (on our cell phone) and that took up a good hour or two. He has some interesting stories. The prisoners at the base he’s working at are apparantly pretty crafty. They make gigantic slingshots out of the elastic bands in the suits they’re given, and actually have done major damage to the towers with the softball-size rocks they launch. They burn down their tents to get the wooden poles out of the structure and sharpen them to make spears. They stockpile hand-soap from the latrines and use it to light fires on just about anything. Eleven escaped through tunnels they dug under the walls (but were caught 12-hours later). It’s kind of surprising, really. Jonothan’s basically clashing with them on a daily basis, fighting off riots and uprisings. He’s also frustrated by some of the same beurocracy that Christopher faced. Because of what happened at Abu-Grep (grape? not sure..), all the commanding officers are scared of getting blamed or accused of prisoner abuse. This means they won’t let soldiers check any “holy items” the prisoners have – Q’uran, prayer mats, anything slightly religious is a no-go. Except, they keep finding that’s where the prisoners hide all their illegal items. They’ve accidentally knocked down Q’urans to find knives falling out of them, and bumped prayer mats to see more knives. It’s obvious they’re hiding it there, but they can’t do anything about it. Basically, they’re putting the prisoner’s lives before my brother’s. Very, very frustrating.

After our little chat, we waited another hour and the power came back (for a total of 6-7 hours without power). And here we are. I played some Halo 2 and have generally just cooled off from a very long string of events. I was going to write up some impressions on the ALU, as well as plans that my parents have for the weekend, but this is long enough already.

His Car, His Girlfriend, and His Job (…)

Jonothan’s on a roll. First his car is TOWED (he found out that it was in fact not stolen, but towed at the consent of an intendant, even though he had permission to leave the car there, but he’s now fighting some beaurocrats over it). Then his girlfriend (fiance, but the title fitted better with girlfriend) walks out on him. Now he’s getting an all-expenses payed trip to Iraq.

I’m not worried, although it did help for me to have previous knowledge of this. Eavesdropping on Christopher’s conversations (not really eavesdropping, but I had my headphones on while he was in the room…) has saved me some shock value. When I say previous knowledge, I knew it was gonna happen a year and a half ago, when he was checking out the prospects on National Guard units. My parents, of course, were not informed.

Like I said, I’m not worried. I know his chances are quite good (he has like a .00001% chance of even being injured) due to the marvelous army medical technology and the now somewhat safer Iraq he’ll be heading to. I’d be a lot more comfortable with this if I knew he was going there to make a difference. Christopher’s accounts left me with little faith in our Army’s officers and tacticians. I don’t disagree with the war, for the most part. I’m not stupid enough to try and think we’d get oil out of this, but other facts on the case don’t match up.

Since I’m already into this post, I might as well account for my day. School was not worth detailing, but I stayed after school with a few others, but I got bored after Amy left, so I found myself being rather unenthused to do much of anything. I went to Gwen’s house until I got picked up, which was an hour or two ago. A rather unenthusiastic day.

EDIT:

Looks like Jonothan’s gonna be on Convoy Patrol. He’ll be accompanying convoys going in and aorund Iraq. He’s also gonna try and get him and his stuff up here, meaning I’ll see him before we leave for Colorado – possibly as early as Monday.